How Financial Automation Commits Millions of Savings Without Anyone’s Consent

There are moments in financial history when danger does not hide in complex products, obscure derivatives, or the darker corners of the banking system. Sometimes it stands in plain sight. It enters through rules. It settles inside the indices. It arrives in technical, neutral, administrative language — and that neutrality is precisely what makes it hard to name.

That is what seems to be happening now with the artificial intelligence boom.

Before going further, it is worth clarifying a few terms.

An IPO, or Initial Public Offering, is the moment when a company that was previously private begins selling its shares to the public on the stock market. Put simply, it is when a company “goes public”, and ordinary investors can buy a piece of it.

A stock market index is a basket of companies used to measure how a part of the market is performing. The Nasdaq-100, for example, groups together many of the large technology companies listed on Nasdaq.

An index fund is a fund that does not try to choose companies one by one. It simply copies an index. If the index contains Apple, Microsoft or Nvidia, the fund buys Apple, Microsoft or Nvidia. If tomorrow another large company enters the index, the fund buys that company too.

A company’s free float is the part of its shares that is actually available to buy and sell on the market. If a company is worth an enormous amount of money but releases only a small part of its shares to the public, the real supply stays thin. That can drive the price upwards, because many buyers are competing for very few available shares.

Now we can come to the point.

In May 2026, Nasdaq introduced important changes to the entry rules for the Nasdaq-100. The so-called fast entry rule allows a newly listed company to be included in the index after only fifteen trading days. The previous minimum free-float requirement of 10% was also removed. And for companies with a low free float, the index applies a special rule that may compel index funds to buy more shares than the real supply would naturally justify.

Put simply: a gigantic company can go public while making only a very small part of its shares available to the public, and still enter a major index very quickly. When that happens, passive funds have to buy.

Not because they have analysed the price.

Not because they believe the business is healthy.

Not because a fund manager has consciously decided to take that risk.

Because the index tells them to.

The passive market does not think. It replicates. And when the index changes, the money of millions of people moves — automatically, without deliberation, without anyone being asked.

This is where the great expected IPOs come in: SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. We are not talking about small companies or marginal start-ups. We are talking about companies whose combined valuation could exceed three trillion dollars.

A valuation is the estimated price of an entire company. If people say that a company is worth one trillion dollars, it means the market is treating the whole business as if it were worth that amount.

In the case of SpaceX, some estimates speak of a possible stock market listing at a valuation close to $1.75 trillion, while Morningstar values the company much lower, at around $780 billion.

That difference is not a technical detail. It is an open wound in the numbers — and wounds of that size do not stay open indefinitely without something giving way.

If these companies enter the major indices quickly, millions of people will become indirect shareholders without having made any conscious decision. Anyone with a private pension plan invested in global index funds may find themselves holding these companies automatically.

Not because they chose them.

Not because they understand them.

Not because they explicitly accepted that risk.

But because they are inside the index.

Here the key idea appears: we may not only be facing a possible valuation........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)